Matt Bell

As everyone who reads this blog probably already knows, Brian Evenson is one of my favorite writers, and someone who's been a major inspiration to my own work. Having read all of his books so far, I can honestly say that his Fugue State (out yesterday from Coffee House Press) is my favorite collection of his so far, and one I can't recommend highly enough. To celebrate the book's released, I've reprinted below my Short Story Month Post about his story "Younger," which opens the collection:

I first read "Younger" when I received the galley a couple months ago, and returning to it now has only accentuated the tense terror of the piece, and the deeply haunted sadness of the younger sister who titles the story.

Here are the opening two paragraphs:

Years later, she was still calling her sister, trying to understand what exactly what happened. It still made no sense to her, but her sister, older, couldn't help. Her sister had completely forgotten--or would have if the younger sister wasn't always reminding her. The younger sister imagined, each time she talked to her sibling on the telephone, each time she brought the incident up, her older sister pressing her palm against her forehead as she waited for her to say what she had to say, so that she, the older sister, the only one of the sisters with a family of her own, could politely sidestep her inquiries and go back to living her life.

Her older sister had always managed to do that, to nimbly sidestep anything that came her way so as to simply go on with her life. For years, the younger sister had envied this, watching from farther and farther behind as her older sister sashayed past those events that an instant later struck the younger sister head-on and almost destroyed her. The younger sister was always almost being destroyed by events, and then had to spend months desperately piecing herself together enough so that when once again she was struck head-on, she would only be almost destroyed rather than utterly and completely destroyed.

All this is only setup for the telling of the actual incident, one which the younger sister has never escaped, perhaps because she feels "more intensely than anyone else," a quality of her personality that she has come to see as "a serious defect that [keeps] her from living her life... that people who felt things as intensely as she were either institutionalized or dead."

As for the incident itself, only the younger sister ascribes any importance to it, and feels that her failure to fully understand what happened and what it meant is what is keeping her from having a happy life. And so she continues to call the older sister, revisiting this one event over and over again: "Do you remember the time we were trapped in the house?"

What happened--or at least the beginning of what happened--was that the father had taken the mother away in the night (presumably to a mental hospital, as she is institutionalized at the time of narration), and has to go back to the hospital in the morning. He leaves the girls at home alone, but first he sets the stove timer to sound when it's time for them to leave for school, and then gives them one last instruction, telling the sisters that "under no circumstances are you to answer the door. You are not to open the door to anyone."

Left to occupy themselves for a short time--"not actually hours but like hours," according to the younger sister, "though she knew that when it came down to it, there was no such things as actual hours"--the two sisters played together, "but the games were different... just as the girls, alone, had become different." Playing with their toy horses, they find their toys--and therefore themselves--liberated to act in ways never allowed while the parents were home, and as they play with the horses they enter an altered, liminal state, the reality of the day slipping and sliding away from the younger sister, until "it wasn't just pretend but something was happening that had never happened before... It was ecstatic and crazed and like they were fleeing their bodies--it was the only thing like a religious experience the younger sister had ever had, and she had had it when she was six... And then it suddenly all went wrong."

It would spoil the story to reveal more, both about the exact nature of their play--which is stunningly related in one of the story's best passages--and about what went wrong in the minutes that followed. It's enough to say that the stakes of the story stay high throughout, and the danger present toward the end feels real enough that despite the older sister's protests, I am inclined to side with the younger, whose inability to escape the shared alternate reality of their childhood is both more horrible and somehow more honest than the older sister's version, where, supposedly, "nothing happened."